My father died sixteen years ago yesterday. You might think I’d have written about him yesterday, I did too, but I didn’t. I was taken over with the beach, he didn’t cross my mind at the moment of sitting with the blank page which is probably a good sign. I don’t mourn him now how I have before, a strike which took, having new born twins at the time, three years to surface. But even then, even in the early years of this anniversary, I wasn’t struck down with grief but more with a memory of that day, how strange it was. I was woken by my babies crying, they were three months old, I hadn’t slept more than a few hours in a row since they were born, I must have been demented. I remember sitting on a mattress on the floor with one of them in my arms and looking at my phone and seeing a missed call or a message, I don’t recall which, but whatever it was it made me haul arse; two babies crying for milk, a change bag grabbed, my husband at the time probably helped pack the car in a hurry, we were a forty-five-minute drive away. We’d known my father was dying, his was the most graceful of exits, a sudden blow up of the body and within a month he was gone, none of the indignity of my mother. The many pills and medications had got on top of each other, his system decided it was enough and shut down. In hospital where he went briefly they called the Macmillan nurses, he sent them out and gave away his cygnet ring when I was in the room to my brother, the most touching of moments to vie with others which made me rage and be forced to remember that this was his death, he could do it any way he pleased. When I turned up too early, before he’d had his shave, I was sent out too despite two little boys and breastfeeding and the hour drive and the impossibility of getting it right. Then it was home to the cottage on the quiet country lane, where he was sent to die, and the trouping of old friends, a queue that stretched to America. I waited in the kitchen. Endless smiles and tea and hugs, we all wanted our perfect ending. When it came time for my little bit of him I weighed up the possibility of being snapped at as his last words to me versus a happy loving memory of chatting days ago when I’d got my visit right. I chose to drive away, not say goodbye, quite certain it would be the last and it was. On the day of his death we raced those country lanes, babies in the back and ran out of petrol a few miles short, had to stop, took the time it took for him to die to fill up the car and get going again. Those ten minutes too late, my brother outside shaking his head. I sat with his body. My mother and one of my sister’s said where has he gone as if I would know. And I saw beings sweeping some distant floor above us, time and space bent to make them miniature, and a door shut behind them. And his body was empty and I didn’t mourn what was not there. But driving home that night, two babies sleeping, the petrol tank full but my forgiveness empty, I thought how can the sun set on this day, it is rude, uncaring, it cannot be.
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Grief, so complex.
Oh Eleanor. After my dad died recently, mum wouldn't stop calling and crying, "is he there? Where is he?"